100 megs at a time

[broberfett]

My girlfriend's computer seems to be losing hard drive space by 100 megabytes at a time. I keep running scans, but it finds nothing. She is using something called Trend Micro. I've been using her computer for a year and a half and never had a problem with it. I went away for a week and then cameback and the only thing different was that she had installed a screensaver. I updated Quicktime and hit the update for WindowsUpdate for 10 "Important" updates. I erased some stuff like games, but the disc space is still bleeding away. I'll also get slow internet page access like it stalls a bit.

 

[Jadzia]

You could try emptying the web cache.

Also, do a right-click-info on the user directory to see how many megabytes of data has accumulated there. If it's several hundred megabytes, find the folder within that has the most megabytes of junk.

 

[Luckyflux]

Log files maybe?

Is it XP? Do a search for all files and folders. (Start-->Search-->For Files and Folders). Click the advanced options and check sytem folder and hidden files/folders. In the look for part type in *.* or just leave it blank. It might take a while as it searches everything. When it is done searching sort the files by size and look at the top for the biggest offenders. Examine the path of the files you want to delete and go to those folders and delete them.

That will help determine which files are huge, but it won't necessarily find log files. You can search for *.txt to find those.

You can also get a freeware utility called CCleaner. It is free and easy and works well. I don't have a link for it so just google it if you want.

 

[Brent]

System Restore might be eating up space, you can disable it or lower the amount of space it consumes.

Also check that the Page file on system managed.

Also download CCleaner and run it to remove junk files.

 

[Marc]

My girlfriend's computer seems to be losing hard drive space by 100 megabytes at a time. I keep running scans, but it finds nothing. She is using something called Trend Micro. I've been using her computer for a year and a half and never had a problem with it. I went away for a week and then cameback and the only thing different was that she had installed a screensaver. I updated Quicktime and hit the update for WindowsUpdate for 10 "Important" updates. I erased some stuff like games, but the disc space is still bleeding away. I'll also get slow internet page access like it stalls a bit.

Under system tools is a program called disk cleanup that will go through and clean up a lot of extraneous stuff and can make a big difference. There can be stuff there people don't know about (dump files from system crashs, health report files and other bits and peices).

Windows also keeps the installation files for the updates it downloadss from Microsoft and they can chew up a disk space over time.

Check that the Trend A/V software isn't keeping the old update files which are starting to get pretty.

Also under system properties is there is the system recovery option where it will create backups of some of the system files to role back if you cock something up.

And then there are shadow copies which allow to keep a multiple copies of a file in case you mess up and need to go back to an old version.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Get a program called WinDirStat and find out what's using all the space. It will display visually how much space is being used and by what files/folders. Very handy for tracking down where your space is going.

 

[broberfett]

The system is Windows Vista. There was a message that the last backup failed that I've ignored for about 6 months. I'll check some of those other things out. I suspect that Trend might just be missing some sort of virus.

 

[broberfett]

Currently I'm sitting at 17.4 Gigs. I haven't observed a drop in about an hour. I undid several of the Window Update's that I received on the same day as the problem, but they are all available now as "Important" updates-15 of them. I'm going out of town so I may not be available for a day or two, but I'll check in on any advice.

 

[farmkid]

Get Spacemonger. It will scan the hard drive and give you a graphical representation of all the files and folders, showing you what's taking up the space. It's very easy what's taking up the space on the drive.

The link above is to the older version 1.4, which is free. There is a newer version, 2.1, which I belive is free for only a limited time. I've only used the older version, and it's one of my favorite utilities now. It'svery small and requires no installation; it's just a .exe file.

 

[BloodCrow]

It wasn't clear from your first post, but is she losing free space, or is it the total ammount of disk space she's losing?

If it's the latter then the hard drive is probably busted. Run checkdisk to be sure: start -> run; type 'cmd' and enter; type 'chkdsk c: /r'; the computer will ask for a reboot and try to fix the disk. If this doesn't work try to back everything up and stop running any scans so it doesn't completely crash.

If it's free space you're talking about then it's a software problem. Checking what happened on the day the problem starten is a good idea, uninstalling windows updates usually isn't. As has been already suggested it might be log files that are using up the free space. I use treesize to check for large files, but the other programs that have been suggested work just as well.

Try to find out what program is eating up so much space and try to uninstall or disable it. If it's something that belongs to Windows you can do a disk cleanup or disable the system restore.

If you think something got past trendmicro try installing an alternative antivirus program. AVG is free and works quite well. Also try installing Malwarebytes, this is the best free anti-malware program out there.

Good luck!

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Get Spacemonger. It will scan the hard drive and give you a graphical representation of all the files and folders, showing you what's taking up the space. It's very easy what's taking up the space on the drive.

The link above is to the older version 1.4, which is free. There is a newer version, 2.1, which I belive is free for only a limited time. I've only used the older version, and it's one of my favorite utilities now. It'svery small and requires no installation; it's just a .exe file.

WinDirStat does the same thing and all versions of it are free--and ad-free, too.